Recently I am seeing that BURP projects are being scheduled that the BOINC manager indicates will take > 500 hours to complete. This seems unreasonable. Can someone explain if this is really the case? Most of my renders usually only need an hour or two at most per frame. I'm a bit new to this, so not sure what to make of it. I have an eight core AMD processor running at 4.7Ghz and a GTForce 960 graphics board. Thanks!

Unfortunately, the current time estimation is completely unreliable. Most of the tasks I've gotten for Danan's sessions (i.e., session 2865) take around 3-4 hours on my i7 4710HQ with 4 cores/8 threads. You can look at the "Server status" page to see the average/minimum/maximum time for recently completed tasks.
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I just finished wu 2580147, task 8994334, session 2920, frm41, prt 01 which took ~10hours with 8 cpus with credit of 287.

Raises 2 issues:

1st - I work on multiple projects and the scheduler thinks burp projects are going to take maybe 15 minutes rather than 10 hours. I then have to decide whether to abort burp projects or other projects - a waste of time for everyone.

2nd - the credit received seems inappropriately small. I read the Payday thread but don't understand when or how manual adjustments are made or how the user is notified that they have been made. Is there not a way to post final credit values in real-time?

I just aborted all tasks (one running and four waiting) because the total time would be a full 2 1/2 days of all my CPU. I value all of my projects, including burp, but burp needs to stop behaving as if it can intrude so blatantly on otherwise well-ordered scheduling and execution of tasks for all projects. I'll consider coming back when that is achieved.

Unfortunately, the way the scheduler works is a necessity of the time-scale on which BURP operates. Since the sessions are submitted by individual users and are not part of a larger data-set to be computed, every effort is made to try and get the session completed and back to the user. SETI, WCG, Rosetta, CPDN and all the other projects that have large data sets to go through will not notice much of a difference if a few users have to cancel tasks or return them late. With BURP, there are actual people waiting for their renders to be completed in the most expedient way possible.

Not everyone agrees with this prioritization, which is unfortunate because we usually lose their computational resources. But, it's a necessity to help out the animators with their projects.
____________Click here to see My Detailed BOINC Stats

BOINC keeps track of how much that happens and skips BURP work for a while afterwards until the resource share is back in balance with what you specify in your account settings.
Sometimes after BURP has been out of work for a while and suddenly has some available the opposite happens: clients will run BURP exclusively for a while before going back to cycling between the projects.

Credit granted during PayDay-runs is shown as regular credit on your account as well as in summary in the forum - last time we even had some fancy graphs to go with it.
At the moment we have no way of posting final credit in real-time since the BOINC credit system does not handle variable-size workunits with no advance knowledge of complexity very well. PayDay is a replacement credit system that handles credit without that particular bit of knowledge but it requires a big statistical basis for granting credit instead, hence the delay.